Todoist vs Nexto: The Honest Comparison for People Who Just Want to Type

If you've ever typed "buy groceries saturday morning" into a todo app and watched it magically figure out the date, you've used natural language input. Todoist popularized it. It's genuinely great. And it's the main reason I ended up building Nexto — a todo app that takes the same idea and strips everything else away.

This is an honest comparison between Todoist and Nexto. Not a "Todoist is bad" piece — Todoist is one of the most polished productivity apps ever made, and for a lot of people it's the right choice. The real question is whether you need everything Todoist offers, or whether you just want the fastest possible way to type a task and be reminded of it.

What both apps share

Both Todoist and Nexto let you type a task in plain English and have the date, time, and reminder set automatically. "Call mom tomorrow at 3pm" works in both. That's the core idea: the app understands your words instead of making you tap through date pickers.

If natural language capture is the only feature you care about, either app delivers it. The differences show up everywhere else.

The honest differences

1. Price

Todoist's free plan works, but real power users hit its limits fast — fewer active tasks, limited reminders, no project views beyond the basics. Pro costs around $5/month, billed yearly. Over a year that's roughly the price of a coffee per month, forever.

Nexto is completely free. No paid tier, no subscription, no ads. Every feature is included, and it's not a trial or a "free with limitations" model. That's it.

2. Platform and collaboration

This is where Todoist clearly wins, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Todoist runs on iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, and the web, with shared projects, team workspaces, and labels, filters, and boards for complex workflows. If you manage tasks across a team or across every device you own, Todoist is the right tool.

Nexto is an iPhone-only app. It's deliberately single-purpose: capture a task fast, get reminded, move on. If your life lives in your pocket, that's fine. If you live in front of a desktop all day and want tasks there too, Nexto won't cover you today.

3. Friction of the core loop

Todoist has a lot going on: projects, labels, filters, priorities, due dates, reminders, sections, and keyboard shortcuts for all of them. That's power, but it's also surface area. When you open the app, there's a decision to make about where the task goes.

Nexto's whole design philosophy is less friction. Open the app, type "submit report tomorrow at 3pm," done. There are no projects to assign, no labels to pick, no priorities to weigh. The app figures out the time and gets out of the way. For quick captures — the kind you do while walking, cooking, or in a meeting — that difference is the whole game.

4. Privacy and accounts

Todoist requires an account and syncs your tasks to its cloud. That's how it delivers cross-device sync and collaboration, and for most people it's a fair trade.

Nexto works without an account entirely. Your tasks live only on your device. No cloud, no account, no analytics. If you'd rather your to-do list not sit in a company's database, that's a real difference.

Quick verdict

• Choose Todoist if: you need cross-platform sync, team projects, complex workflows with labels and filters, or a proven power tool you can grow into.
• Choose Nexto if: you want the fastest possible capture on iPhone, don't need collaboration, and prefer a free, account-less, local-first app.

"I had Todoist Pro for two years. The killer feature was always natural language input, but I was paying for projects and filters I never used. Nexto does the one thing I actually needed, and it's free." — Nexto user

What actually matters

Every todo app fails for the same reason: you stop opening it. Todoist doesn't fail because it's badly built — it fails for people who get overwhelmed by its features. Nexto doesn't fail for that reason because there's nothing to get overwhelmed by.

If you've bounced off every todo app because setting up a task took longer than remembering it, that's the problem worth solving. Try Nexto — it's free, so the only thing you lose is five seconds of typing.

Curious why natural language is the capture method that finally works? Read why natural-language input is the only todo capture that actually works, or the story of why I built Nexto in the first place.